Cardinal Burke: Speak out for life

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

Cardinal Raymond Burke, the former Archbishop of St. Louis, told the Serra Club of New Orleans May 13 that Catholics must speak out against abortion even if they do not feel sufficiently educated on the subject to make persuasive arguments.

“A lot of people give up and just say, ‘Well, that’s the way the world is going. I’m just going to keep my beliefs private,’” Cardinal Burke told the Serra Club, a group that supports and prays for vocations to the priesthood and religious life. “But we’re called to give a witness. Pope St. John Paul II said ‘the way the family goes is the way that the nation goes and our world (goes).’ Do not be afraid to speak up for the truth.”

Cardinal Burke said even if pro-life supporters don’t have the perfect words to express their beliefs, their witness will have an impact.

“A lot of people say, ‘Well, I don’t have all that much education or I don’t speak very well,’” the cardinal said. “Well, if you have the courage to profess your faith to someone who’s saying things that are crazy, that will have its effect. It never goes without its effect. We need to get courage.”

He called the support for legalized abortion by Catholic politicians a “terrible scandal we have in our country.”

“These so-called Catholic politicians are pushing an agenda that’s simply evil and claiming to be good Catholics,” he said. “(St. John Paul II) said the great problem today is that people think that their faith is separate from their public life, whether it’s in business or politics or whatever it is. That can’t be. Whatever we’re doing should be informed by a Christian ethic, by the grace of Christ. We have to be convinced that each one of us, in our own little way, can make a difference, because if we’re waiting for somebody else to do it, that’s no good.”

A Serran asked Cardinal Burke why many church leaders have not been more forceful in “coming out against abortion.”

“That’s a very good question, and I've wondered about it myself,” Cardinal Burke said. “Some of the reasons are really false reasons. Some think if you talk too harshly about this, you will make those people suffer who were part of an abortion, and so you say, ‘We shouldn’t talk about it.’ Others think that you have to talk about abortion with no more conviction than you talk about immigration and other things – the so-called seamless garment argument.”

Cardinal Burke said “all of the great philosophers and theologians of the moral law,” including St. Thomas Aquinas, believed that “God wires in the human heart a right order of things, and the fundamental law is to do good and avoid evil.”

Aquinas stressed that flowing from that, the protection of human life is foundational.

“If we think about it, it makes perfect sense,” Cardinal Burke said. “If I'm made in the image and likeness of God, then so is my brother or sister, whether it's an unborn baby or any other person.”

Another “confusion in our country,” Cardinal Burke said, is that “if you talk about abortion, you're mixing religion with the state – and there is separation of church and state.”

He said that argument misrepresents the non-establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution.

“It's not that religion isn't important,” Cardinal Burke said. “Even our early presidents were Christians in a certain way, but they always said that religion was very important and religious faith and belief were important to the life of the nation. You have to say, ‘No, I am not defending human life because it's a dogma of the Catholic Church, which surely it is; I'm defending human life because it is fundamental to the good of us all. It is the good to be done. And, if you attack human life, it is evil to be avoided.”

Cardinal Burke, a member of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura at the Vatican and founder of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse, Wisconsin, was in New Orleans May 15 to celebrate a Pontifical High Mass at St. Patrick Church on Camp Street.

Cardinal Burke also spoke about the value of Catholics making pilgrimages to deepen their faith.

“I want to encourage, in terms of vocational discernment, the importance of pilgrimage to a holy place as the most ancient form of devotion in the church,” he said. “We can so easily lose sight in our ordinary, daily life of the extraordinary nature of our life. Because Christ is with us through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit into our souls, our ordinary life is always extraordinary.”

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